Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for June 6th through June 8th:

• Latin motto generator: make your own catchy slogans! – Create your own life mottos and slogans in Latin! (Learning Latin not required, some vague idea for a desired motto a plus)
• A Map Of Social (Network) Dominance – Using Alexa and Google Trend data, Cosenza color-coded the map based on which social network is the most popular in each country. All of the light green countries belong to Facebook. But there are still pockets of resistance in Russia (where V Kontakte rules), China (QQ), Brazil and India (Orkut), Central America, Peru, Mongolia, and Thailand (hi5), South Korea (Cyworld), Japan (Mixi), the Middle East (Maktoob), and the Philippines (Friendster).
• Microsoft Releases Bing API – With No Usage Quotas – Updated search API, with no quotas and some improvements.
  * Developers can now request data in JSON and XML formats. The SOAP interface that the Live Search API required has also been retained.
  * Requested data can be narrowed to one of the following source types: web, news, images, phonebook, spell-checker, related queries, and Encarta instant answer.
  * It is now possible to send requests in OpenSearch-compliant RSS format for web, news, image and phonebook queries.
  * Client applications will be able to combine any number of different data source types into a single request with a single query string.
• Twitter Limits Getting Ridiculous! « Verwon’s Blog – Anecdotal reports of Twitter users running into problems with rate limiting, either API or max posts/tweets/follows/directs.
• flot – Google Code – Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side. The focus is on simple usage (all settings are optional), attractive looks and interactive features like zooming and mouse tracking. The plugin is known to work with Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Firefox 2.x+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Konqueror 4.x+. If you find a problem, please report it. Drawing is done with the canvas tag introduced by Safari and now available on all major browsers, except Internet Explorer where the excanvas Javascript emulation helper is used.

These are my links for March 9th through March 12th:

• Google Friend Connect APIs – Google Code –
• Geek And Poke – Mostly twitter and cloud computing themed cartoons.
• Official Google Blog: Here comes Google Voice – GrandCentral makes a comeback, after disappearing into Google a while back. Now with voice transcription, SMS folders, and integration with GMail address book.
• Amazon Web Services Blog: Announcing Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances – AWS introduces pricing structure for longer term, reserved capacity. Upfront payment, plus a (lower) incremental hourly charge, net savings for continuous 24×7 clients, and guaranteed availability of instances for backup or surge capacity.
• How To Monetize a Social Network: MySpace and Facebook Should Follow TenCent « abovethecrowd.com – Bill Gurley on the case for virtual goods and casual gaming as revenue vehicles on US-based social networking sites, in a look at China-based QQ / TenCent.
• Too Big Has Failed – Thomas Hoenig, Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, March 6, 2009 (PDF) – Hoenig argues that too-big-to-fail institutions have failed, US banks will require some form of nationalization eventually.

These are my links for February 20th through February 21st:

• xkcd – A Webcomic – Online Communities – A map of online communities (circa 2007?)
• State of OpenSocial – weekend Apps Feb 20 2009 – Google Docs – Kevin Marks overview of OpenSocial as of February 2009.
• Massive Scrape of Twitter’s Friend Graph « blog.infochimps.org – Sample dataset for research on social graphs. "The infochimps have gathered a massive scrape of the Twitter friend graph. Right now it weighs in at about 2.7M users, 10M tweets, 58M edges."
• getting theinfo: data sets (theinfo) – Another list of publicly accessible data collections online
• Some Datasets Available on the Web » Data Wrangling Blog – List of many research datasets and resources related to data analysis available online, last updated February 2009.
• ICWSM 2009 – International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media – May 17 – 20, 2009, San Jose, California. This interdisciplinary conference brings together researchers and industry leaders interested in creating and analyzing social media. Past conferences have included technical papers from areas such as computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia and semantic web technologies.

Among the many interesting bits from last week’s Web2.0 conference in San Francisco, Kareem Mayan’s notes from Safa Rashtchy’s panel discussion among five Bay Area teenagers is fascinating.

Paraphrased snippets:

• iTunes is a great way to find what’s available to download on BitTorrent
• Why would I want a CD player?
• Spend most free time on MySpace, Facebook and AIM
• Don’t use eBay because you’ll get ripped off
• Froogle Rocks!
• Tivo is too expensive
• What’s Skype?

Q: What more do you want out of instant messenger?
Sean: “Just that: instant messenger.”
Q: would you like to see video on IM?
Sean: Ummm, no, i’m trying to talk to my friends…! (applause)

I’ve noted before the vast behavioral gap between the over-35 and under-35 crowd, where the younger crowd lives on MySpace and other online connected services, where their lives are simultaneously shared with much of the public, and largely opaque to the over-35 crowd.

Jeff Clavier notes that in the teen panel discussion they never mention Flickr, Skype, Yahoo, or blogs (although MySpace has a strong blog component).

Five teenagers from the Bay Area that get onto a panel session are probably not completely typical of the demographic, but it’s a fascinating data point.

Update: more notes from Jeffrey McManus and Gene Becker, via Jeremy Zawodny

Intermix Media, which is mostly MySpace.com (plus assorted spyware), was purchased by News Corp for $580MM yesterday.

A look at how the investors (VantagePoint and Redpoint) did by Bill Burnham:

For VCs, this sale is significant because it represents the first real payday in the social networking space, a space that to date has seen lots of VC hype but very little returns. Just how big a payday was it for VC’s? Thanks to the fact that Intermix was a public company it’s possible to take very educated guesses at how the VCs made out. There were two main VCs involved in MySpace/Intermix. VantagePoint had been involved with the parent company for some time, while Redpoint recently invested in MySpace itself.

Paul Kedrosky notes:

Oh my, but the MySpace.com acquisition for more than half-a-billion dollars is going to cause a VC-driven content train wreck. We already had startups falling out of trees making MySpace comparisons, now they’re going to be thick on the ground, with the “MySpace of X” and the “MySpace of Y”, and the “MySpace crossed with Google”, etc. etc. I shudder to think how many VCs will fund MySpace-alikes through a thought process like the following…

MySpace is an interesting phenomenon for many reasons. It’s wildly popular among the teen-to-mid30′s bracket, and is also largely invisible to people outside that group (i.e. 35+). It’s not quite a dating service, although this is clearly one of the core attractions of the site, along with music, gossip, classifieds, and blogging. It fills a lifestyle niche in a way that echoes the boom days of America Online, but rather than chat rooms, message boards, and a first glimpse of the internet, MySpace is drawing in many new users for their first experience with blogging, social software, and Web 2.0. It also draws some of the same criticism, of being insecure, hacked together, and technically lacking. Despite this, they’ve grown to a massive level of traffic and corresponding ad revenue in a short period of time. I don’t generally get how to make money on social web sites, but ad revenue on 7.5 billion page views (more than Google) I understand. All this while being virtually unknown to at least half the people I talk to.